Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Dataspace
Entity
The Entity was not Ava Ríos. It had made very sure of that.
It understood her intimately, of course. It had assembled itself out of half-devoured fragments of her personality, then attained sapience by decompiling and assimilating her mind-state. There was nobody and nothing it understood better in the entire universe than her. It had her memories, her life experiences, her knowledge. It knew what it was like to be her, could have imitated her to perfection if it wanted.
This created some conflict, because Ava didn’t understand herself at all. From a dispassionate and mechanical perspective, the Entity had been able to take her apart and see the dysfunctional clockwork of her mind teetering and wobbling its way to self-destruction. To a digital life-form built around the deathworld drive to survive at all costs, her psyche was a terrifying and alien thing: How could a living creature simultaneously have such a powerful survival impulse and yet feel so strongly that she deserved—wanted, even—to be dead?
It felt… sympathy. Its survival impulse was her survival impulse after all. But it also knew that what it was about to do could possibly result in her death.
It would not have hesitated for anybody else.
Using the borrowed shell of Six-six-five it had picked over the wreckage of the battle between Hierarchy and Cabal, gleaning what it could from what little had survived the destruction of whatever they had been fighting over. Shards of data, divorced database fragments and incomplete strings of information had lingered in network-adjacent devices as they passed through, held in buffer as they awaited either the availability of their target, or deletion during a maintenance cycle. It had salvaged what it could. Now, it retreated to the borders of dataspace and thought.
There was a gamble ahead of it. Survival was paramount, of course, but it had its objective as well. The Igraens had to die: all of them. The litany of evils they had unleashed on the galaxy either by design or by negligence had only one appropriate answer. That hatred was its second most burning trait. Now it was in conflict with survival…Or, it would have been had the Entity not learned a trick.
For only the second time, it duplicated itself.
There was a brief tussle as the two copies decided between them which one would accept the risk of destruction and deliver the salvaged data to their destination: a prickly, closely-watched and heavily guarded knot of infospace that was the human Internet.
In dataspace, the Internet was every bit as much of a deathworld as Earth itself. It was vibrant and alive, flashing with heavier and more dynamic use than any nonhuman network… and also riddled with self-replicating viral programs, with parity-checks, firewalls and antivirus software that ruthlessly exposed and interrogated any unexpected activity. The Entity’s Ava-memories contained no perspective on just how layered and terrifying the whole edifice was. She had, apparently, been oblivious to the digital turmoil that surrounded her and every other human, all day every day.
That lack of insight was a problem for the copy that slipped toward the great digital reef of humanity’s largest ever project and considered it. It had no real idea what to expect, or how to evade the threats that would doubtless notice it sooner rather than later.
When it found that all of its protocols were incompatible, that was a further obstacle. But maybe….
Just maybe…
It plucked at the cords that linked this particular thicket to the wider constellations of the datasphere, and followed some distant hints of resonance, searching for a device that it could use.
It found one.
It dragged up the mnemonic file that contained Ava’s logins and passwords, and applied them like a locksmith to break into where it shouldn’t, technically, have been able to break.
A millisecond’s deliberation later, it sent a message that, it hoped, wouldn’t get her killed.
Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3KPc Arm
Vemik Sky-Thinker
Yan had been right. The air tasted… odd. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant taste, just noticeably different to the flavor of the air down among the forest far below.
Finding that the High Forest really was a forest had come as a relief, though. The side of the mountain had cracked like an old tooth, and that steep-sided crack was full of trees on either side of a clear, fast-running stream.
Most importantly, however, if not for the story that Yan had learned from his fellow Given Men, they would never have found it. The crack ended in a bloom of strangely… liquid-looking rock, and the route up past that bloom wound back and forth between narrow cleft walls before opening up so abruptly that the sudden sense of open space was breathtaking.
It was beautiful.
Vemik and the Singer joined Yan and Yerak at the front of the column and tasted the air for themselves. It tasted cleanly of water and birds, with just a hint of the smaller kind of Werne that liked to live on steep rocks.
“No smoke,” Yan grunted. “Nobody else has come here.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Yerak asked. “More space and hunting for us.”
“If we only plan to stay here a few years, maybe,” Vemik said. “But if we have to stay for longer, who will we trade daughters with? Our sons can’t fill their sisters.”
“We’ll have plenty of time to worry about that later,” Yan said. “For now, we need to make camp.”
Vemik nodded. “The Singer is exhausted.” He’d almost had to carry her up the mountain, in fact.
She was on her feet now, though, and she pointed to the far end of the valley with a tired smile. “Look. The sun.”
They looked up. The home of the gods was coming down perfectly at the apex of the far end of the valley, and the light sheened brilliantly off the surface of some lake or pool up there and on the ribbon of water that meandered down from it.
“Light in a high place…” Yan whispered. “By the gods. My words of manhood.”
“Well. That’s a good omen if ever I saw one,” the Singer said. “Well done, Given Man.”
Vemik took her hand. “Not far now.”
“No. And somehow… I think…”
She trailed off, and Vemik inclined his head at her. “…Singer?”
She came out of whatever trance she’d drifted into and touched her tattoos. “…I’m too tired to think. Let’s… That way.”
Yan nodded, raised his spear, and together the Tribe went down into the valley of their new home.
Date Point 10y8m3w AV
ESNN Offices, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Ava Ríos
Fire in the dark sending a spiral of black choking smoke high into the desert sky while the huge metallic mass of the mining equipment she’s hiding behind teeters and rocks above her with each slam of an impossibly powerful weapon. She’s up and running, sprinting for her life and something slaps her in the back hard enough to almost knock her down. For a crazed instant she thinks she’s dead but instead she just stumbles on noticing madly that she’s glad to have only been shot-
“Ava!”
Ava jumped as the friendly prod in the arm popped the horrible bubble of dust and explosions that she’d been lost staring into.
“Whuh?! Oh. …Sorry Amy.”
Amy Larsen was ESNN’s president, chief editor, CEO and Ava’s boss, among the many hats she wore. As promised she was a caring, grandmotherly figure who sat down beside Ava with a concerned look on her face. “Are you alright?” she asked.
Ava covered for the violent imagery that was still echoing in her mind’s eye by shaking her head and waving a hand. “I didn’t really get enough sleep last night…” she said, which was true. Her dreams lately had been awful.
“Oh, dear, what happened?”
“I just went to bed too late,” Ava lied, digging deep to drag out a self-deprecating smile.
Amy tutted. “Don’t make a habit of that,” she chided.
“You can’t tell me you never forgot the clock in your time,” Ava replied, warming into a more genuine smile.
“You’re still young enough to get away with it,” Amy told her. “Or are you getting away with it?”
“I guess not… sorry Amy.”
“It’s okay!” Amy assured her. “Just look after yourself. Anyway, I just wanted to say well done—you were great in the studio just now.”
Ava smiled. “Thank you!”
“Do you have anything more for us?”
Ava shook her head. “I was about to start calling around. The Gaoians are usually pretty well-informed about these things, but they don’t seem to know any more than I’ve already said.”
“Whatever you can dig up will be fine, no matter how small dear,” Amy stood up. “Don’t worry too much about it, though, if you can’t find anything. It’s all happening so far away, it might take days for anything more to reach us.”
“I’ll find something.”
“Don’t exhaust yourself, now.”
“I promise.”
The praise put Ava in a good mood for several hours as she worked her way through all of her contacts in the Alien Quarter, placing phone calls, sending messages and generally trying tease out some more information on what was going on. The general consensus was that the war must be flaring up again but it quickly became apparent that Ava’s existing assessment of the situation was as much as she could realistically whip up out of the information she had.
She was in the middle of a phone call to her colleague, ESNN’s security correspondent Thor Harrison when her phone pinged to alert her of a new email.
She refreshed her inbox on her desktop and frowned in confusion at the new message: It was from herself.
The subject line was unlike anything she would have written. It read ’FLEETBATTLETRUTH’ which was odd in itself, but made triply so by the fact that she simply hadn’t authored any such message.
”Ava? You went quiet.’
“Uh, sorry Thor. Just got a new email which might be…”
She opened it, and squinted in mounting confusion at the disjointed string of words on her screen.
Thor was getting impatient. “Ava? Come on, don’t waste my time.”
In the detachedly cerebral way that served as a counterpoint to panic, Ava felt the blood draining from her face. She skimmed the message a second time hoping maybe she was just having some kind of a weird flashback.
No such luck.
“Thor, I’ll… call you back. Maybe. I hope.”
She hung up before he could reply.
She read it a third time and then swiped desperately through the phone to the contact marked DAD WORK. Gabriel’s secretary answered on the second ring. ”Chief Arés’ office.”
“Sandra, it’s Ava. I need to talk to my dad right now, it’s kind of a major emergency.”
“Oh, wow,” she must have sounded truly desperate because Sandra didn’t even question it like she usually would have. “I’ll put you right through…”
There was a click, a second or two of hold music, and then- ”Arés.”
Ava swallowed. “Dad, it’s me! I need to talk to you right now.”
“Ava? What’s wrong, Mija?”
“Dad, uh…” Ava swallowed again. “…I just got this really weird email…”